are told, established as boatswain and laborer at one of the Greenland settlements. For an Eskimo, he must be regarded by his neighbors as a wealthy man, for the interest of the money he received as pay in his four expeditions would certainly yield a very comfortable competence to a resident in Greenland. Let us hope he will live long to enjoy the comforts of a life at home, and we may surely add to the name which he has already earned for himself as a mighty hunter a new reputation as an author.
The credit for the appearance of this little book is entirely due to Dr. Rink, who has so admirably translated and edited it. He is perhaps the only man in the world who could have undertaken the task and executed it so well. A master of the Eskimo language, and perfectly familiar, from a long residence in Greenland, with the manners and customs of the natives, besides possessing a personal knowledge of the author, he was peculiarly fitted for the work which he has so successfully concluded; and which will, we predict, take its place amid the many volumes of Arctic adventure which are now before the public, and be read with equal interest.
Dr. Rink, in an introduction, gives a slight sketch of the early life of the author, and briefly summarizes the narratives of the four expeditions in which Hans Hendrik served, and which had for their object the attainment of a high northern latitude. Albert H. Markham.
THE VARIOUS CAUSES OF SCEPTICISM.
Mr. Gladstone, in his remarkable article in the Contemporary Review on "The Sixteenth Century Arraigned Before the Nineteenth," and Mr. Baldwin Brown, in his not less remarkable address to the Congregational Union at Liverpool on Tuesday on the explanation of the great sceptical movements of the day, strike the same note. They hold that the truest explanation of the shortcomings of scepticism in our generation is the fault of the orthodoxy of the previous generation. It was the practical paganism of the Catholic world, say both, which gave rise to the Reformation; and it was the onesidedness of the various Reformers which gave rise to the intellectual revolts of the later heresiarchs. Thus, Mr. Baldwin Brown holds that it was Calvinism which caused Unitarianism. "Take the Unitarian heresy in modern times. He held that the high Calvinistic theology, coming perilously near, as it did, to the presentation of an interior discord in the triune nature, which was harmonized by the atonement, almost inevitably developed a community which could see only the unity, and felt itself called to bear witness to the vital aspect of that truth to the world." And no doubt not only is there very great truth in the general doctrine that the degeneracy of a great faith almost inevitably leads to the sincere proclamation of some half-true but energetic doctrine which is the natural protest against the spurious form in which that faith has been held, — just as idolatrous tendencies in Christianity directly promoted the spread of Mahommedanism, — but those who know the history of Calvinism and Unitarianism know how much there is to be said for Mr. Baldwin Brown's special illustration of it. At the same time, we cannot believe that explicit reaction against a degenerate and implicitly heterodox faith, is the sufficient explanation of all such forms of error. Else what are we to say to the widespread atheism, — or to the still more dangerous, because colder and more indifferent, secularism, — of the present day? Is that to be explained as a legitimate reaction against the hollowness of any previous form of religious faith? It can hardly be true that all falsehood is half-truth, and is the proper cure for some deficiency in the previous profession of the truth. It may well be indeed that while the people of Europe were slowly learning to believe in a righteous and loving God, it was impossible for them to be taught to believe in physical law; and it may also be that now when the people of Europe are being taught the meaning and uses of physical law, it is not very easy for them to retain at the highest point, — the point of truth, — their belief in a righteous and loving God. Nobody can say that in dealing with "such creatures as we are, in such a world as the present," it is easy to give us a firm grasp of any great class of truths whatever, without loosening our grasp on some other class of truths, perhaps nobler and more vital, though it may be also, for that very reason, a class of truths less difficult to recover. Still, this is a very different thing from saying that every form of explicit error is due to reaction against some still more serious implicit error in the faith of our fathers. Voltaire may have been raised up as a wholesome scourge of selfish superstitions, and yet it does not follow that every one who follows
